Bakker on the Masochistic Joys of the Internet

I received this insightful email from R.S. Bakker of Neuropath fame today (reprinted here with his permission). Others might find it of interest as well:

I just finished reading your post on blogging and I thought I would make a pitch for reinterpreting what you take to be the downside. I would have posted directly on your blog, but (ironically, I suppose) I haven’t been able to post anywhere without feeding the spam-filter ever since Norton last gave my system a good scrub. I’ve been warring on the web in various forms (for years, it was only messageboards) for over a decade now. I could literally write a book about the nastiness you discuss! I’ve been stalked. I’ve been the target of organized smear campaigns by groups of fascist and feminist trolls. I’ve been called names I never imagined possible! I’ve had multiple death threats made against me and my family. I’ve had several young schizophrenic men argue that God put me on earth to write for them!

But no matter how rattled I’ve been, no matter how desperately down, I’ve always reminded myself that all these things are symptoms of success

I admit, I have a peculiar way of looking at the ongoing communications revolution, about what it means, where it’s going. I think, for instance, it’s largely responsible for the resurgence of fascist ideologies across the globe. Before the web, you had to talk to your neighbour if you wanted to work through your self-serving parochial intuitions, you had to listen to someone who in all likelihood disagreed.

Not so now. Feel inclined to starve yourself? There’s an ingroup for that. Feel inclined to assault an immigrant? There’s an ingroup for that as well. One of the things that most worries me about the web is that it provides a like-minded community for pretty much any insanity you can think of. The well of confirmation is now effectively empty. And you can count on Google to keep you safe from contrary opinions.

Another thing that worries me is how it has allowed anti-intellectual sentiment to congeal into an explicit cultural self-identity.

So when I established Three Pound Brain I resolved two things: to make it utterly open to all comments (outside verbal aggression directed at fellow commentators (I consider myself to be fair game)), and to self-consciously seek out periodic ‘blog wars’ with politically extreme bloggers. The thing that many liberal academics don’t realize (even as they find themselves amazed time and again every election) is the degree to which they are losing their cultural war. I mean, I’m a moderately successful novelist, with a moderately successful blog, but when I go to battle against the likes of Theodore Beale (‘Voxday’), say, I’m not simply dealing with someone who openly and endlessly advocates for the forced relocation of nonwhite immigrants in Europe and North America into concentration camps, or for relieving women of the burdensome right to vote, I’m arguing with a blogger who gets tens of millions of views. It boggles unto heartbreak.

I don’t want to minimize what you’ve experienced, because I know firsthand what it’s like to avoid my blog and email for days at a time out of dread, but what you’re describing is literally leakage, the drip-drip of what is a deluge of hatred and inanity. The reason I turned my back on writing literary fiction (which is to say, writing for myself) was simply the idea that our technologies are making it ever-more easy to succumb to our groupish instincts, to hang out with the like-minded – the safe. So whenever the opportunity arises, I evangelize like I’m doing now, I urge academics to get their hands dirty and their hearts bruised, to reach out, celebrate the vitriol as evidence that some small shred of something genuinely critical has slipped through.

To practice, in other words, what I call ‘cultural triage,’ to recognize the unprecedented nature of their age, and the unprecedented dangers that confront us all (in this, a time when high-school students can engineer new bacteria for their science fair!). To do what they can to reach out of their ingroup comfort zones whenever they can, and to see the nastiness as forensic evidence of crimes committed against a terrifying status quo.

What you describe is simply an example of blogging outward, Levi, of being part of the solution. Celebrate it, white-knuckles and all! And please urge others to do the same.

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3 Responses to “Bakker on the Masochistic Joys of the Internet”

The larger urban Occupy camps experienced something not unrelated. It isn’t just the internet that separates and herds us into social groups that have little in common. I’ve read that in the course of a persons working life, they will almost never have personal conversations with anyone outside their class. In the ten years I spent as a fly on wall working for temps–this sounds right. As for the Occupy camps–as individuals came together from backgrounds where they would never have met outside that setting, and stripped of the defenses and masks, the repressed pathology of the world outside emerged in full view. I can tell you, it got pretty ugly at times. So i doesn’t surprise me to hear about the threats and trolls and blog hatters… I don’t think this is at all peculiar to the web. The web is certainly altering how we relate, but it itself a model of the fragmented, alienated world we inhabit.. in our respective compartmentalized lives.

Bravo, R. Scott Bakker! Brilliantly said. I’ve been living it too, in no small fashion.

Guys, I have an AP reporter driving three hours to come to interview me this Friday because my free alternative community newspaper in the rural Missouri Bible belt was shut down by mob rule a couple of months ago–my advertisers were threatened, ditto for the points of distribution, the paper was vandalized, I was threatened with lawyers, called a Bloomberg cunt (a reference to my being from NYC), nasty insulting sometimes frightening phone calls at home and on my cell, e-mails saying they would spit in my face, that they wanted to put my happy ass on a plane to Afghanistan, not to mention a stenching river of pus on our Facebook page and elsewhere.

I was written up and slammed on military blogs (the offending issue of my paper was downloaded more than 10,000 times), the television news from Rush Limbaugh’s hometown came up to do a story (I didn’t talk to them), media columnist Mike Miner from The Chicago Reader somehow heard about it and wrote a column in which he characterized what had happened in the town as a “seizure.” Consequently, I was put out of business, my livelihood is gone.

Was it distressing? Uh, yeah it was. (I live alone in the country, actually now my nephew is here until my house sells and I can move on/get the fuck out.) Would I have changed a word I wrote challenging JROTC in the schools, advocating for peace? No, I would not. Do I believe that I made a positive difference? I know with certainty that I did, and not alone. Others took risks, got braver and will stay brave. Like fear, courage is contagious.

For me, my experiences make Levi’s work more crucial than ever, the mapping of the possible avenues for change, opening up the understanding and the possibilities for change’s emergence. Answers, advances, alternatives, if they come, will not come from knowing; they will come from being. A different way of being.